Udhay Shankar N [01/08/11 21:46 +0530]:
"You know, back in the forty-niner days, every gold mining town in
California had a nerd with a scale," Avi says. "The assayer. He sat in
an office all day. Scary-looking rednecks came in with pouches of gold
Extremely erudite bullshit, I'm afraid.
Nerd assayers were typically employed by larger mine bosses and/or banks /
stage companies (like wells fargo, which was both and is now just a bank),
who had enough money to hire completely non nerd gunmen to make sure nobody
took off with all that gold.
wells fargo guards were issued with shotguns firing double ought buck, and
didn't exactly hesitate to use them at anybody even looking cross eyed at
all that gold.
And even if someone did try to hit an assay office - gold bearing ore tends
to get really heavy to handle or carry off so you'd have several kilos of
dirt just to get a couple of grams of gold. So it made no business sense
for bandits to hit a gold assay office where all they'd find was gold dust
(more dust than gold) and promissory notes redeemable at the nearest bank,
or maybe just an entry in the books kept at the store to pay for your later
purchases / your debts, for all but petty cash amounts, not to mention
regular shifts of heavily armed guards.
Most gold heists back then were usually carried out by ambushing stage
coaches carrying the refined product were shipped out from the mining
town. Either hold up the coach and hope you could shoot the guard before he
got his shotgun into action + there were no passengers aboard (nearly all
packing guns of one variety or the other), or just dynamite some rock onto
the coach and pick through the pieces to get the gold + any jewellery,
money etc the thoroughly dead passengers might be carrying.
civilized, and the towns filled up with churches and schools and
universities, and the sort of howling maniacs who got there first were
all assimilated or driven out or thrown into prison, and the nerds had
boulevards and opera houses named after them. Now, is the analogy clear?"
Assay clerks rarely got all that rich compared to, say, storekeepers who
would pack food, mining tools / dynamite, clothes etc over all that terrain
by mule train, (or saloon owners who shipped booze and whores in) and then
sold it to the all those "howling maniacs" at grossly inflated 'boomtown'
rates, and also extend loans to the miners with mining claims as collateral
Gold rush stories notwithstanding, mining is something that takes a huge
amount of money in capex and opex before you make a red cent of income, so
only people with deep pockets (plus a talent for dealmaking) would come out
ahead compared to random guys who drift into the gold fields to try their
luck and then move on.
The nerd with a basic knowledge of chemistry and an assayers kit didn't get
as rich as some guy who could barely sign his name but was more unethical
and had a better head for business than others in the mining camp.
This guy for example - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horace_Tabor
So neal's analogy is not only unclear, its flat out wrong. I don't have
the patience to plow through the rest of his extremely thick books, and
hate to plow through verbose writing (though I'm guilty of that myself, a
lot), so I'm not going to trawl through his books for more such examples.
Nerds still don't make money other than 100 odd k a year in salary working
for someone who may or may not be a nerd but does have a head for business.
--srs
